Divisadero (29 page)

She saw her life then for
what it was. There would always be this pointless and impotent dreaming on
farms, and there would always be a rich man on horseback who galloped across
the world, riding into a forest just to inhale its wet birch leaves after a
storm.

‘Where is your yellow
dress?’ Lucien asked when giving her a lift into Marseillan, and her answer
stuttered into silence. One evening shortly afterwards,
she
and Lucien talked for long hours into the night. Roman was still in prison, and
she believed she herself did not have much more than the fate of a mule. She
spoke to Lucien about everything, confessing her poverty, and he admitted his
unawareness. Even though he was her closest neighbour, he had been preoccupied
by his own life.

He went to Marseillan and
bought the property she lived on outright from the Simone family, partly with
money and partly with an exchange of
fi
elds. A day or so later, everything was notarized and he walked up
the hill to her farmhouse with the papers. He saw her by the well and called
out her name, but she did not move. She kept staring down into the well. He
came up to her, and her focus of intent hesitated at the sound of his voice and
she turned to him. She had heard the news that someone was buying the
farmhouse. He took her hand and she jerked it back. But he would not let go. He
pulled her that way towards the house. It was the way Roman persuaded her into
sexuality, and her heart beat fast from embarrassment for both of them.
For him, her friend, as well as herself.

He made her sit at the
blue table. It was the table he would take away from that small farmhouse some
years later, and it became the dearest possession in his life. She sat on his
right, and he spread out the bill of sale in front of them. He went over all
the clauses, reading them, explaining them. It was something other than shock
when she noticed her name. She’d been given nothing in her life, on even the
slightest scale.

Then, a few minutes later,
only halfway through the document, she relaxed, and he sensed it immediately.
What is it?
he
asked. She shook her head and kept
reading the paper before her. There’d been no gasp of breath or gesture, but he
was so familiar with her nature he’d recognized the sudden lightness. What is
it?
he
said again.
She watched him, smiling. Nothing, she said.
It was not connected with this grand gesture and the gift of property, but some
realization by her that made the acceptance of it possible. They were old
allies. And only she knew why, when they sat down side by side at the table,
she had known automatically which of the two chairs to sit in. It was so his
good eye would be next to her and could share the page they read together,
while the other eye—his blindness, at all their differences in this life—was
far from this intimacy.
She made a sparrow’s dinner for them, and needing something to praise, he
praised the freshness of her well water until she was laughing at him. He was
always too shy and tentative to speak about his own work. Instead they
discussed her plans for the
fi
elds, and that night, when he returned home, he took down the
military pamphlet from his library shelf. He could sense her excitement about
the farm
’
s possibilities, now
that she owned the land. At one point during their meal he even said what had
crossed her mind already—that she was now entering the world of the grower of
the black tulip. She nodded. They were as close as that.
And though she spoke that night far more than he did, she knew in essence all
about him, the range of his successes, his two daughters,
his
wife. Then, just before he left, as he stood up she asked him to sit down
again, and she told him about the miscarriage, and how she could not stand it.
She could not stand it. She could not stand it.
One solitary light in the room over the blue table.
And him putting his hands out to reach for her thin
fi
ngers that had nothing in them.

As close as she was to
Lucien, the idea of physical passion between them had not existed in her mind.
Her frolic of a dance with him at his wedding had been just that, a bookend to
signal the end of their youth. They had been taught the steps of a waltz by his
mother in the barnyard, who had stated that, if they were reading about life in
Paris and Fontainebleau, they needed to practice their social skills, and that
the three essential areas of training for a musketeer were horsemanship,
swordsmanship, and dancing. Lucien
’
s interpretation of
a dance, con
fi
rmed by his studying of engravings, had been that it was an act
where you pushed the shoulders of your partner until you both reached the far
end of a room, while the girl suspected dancing meant simply intermingling for
a period of time under the spell of musicians. His mother had needed to educate
them both.

Still, the two of them
were cautious around each other. In spite of their proximity, they had their
own lives and separate beliefs. When Marie-Neige reconsidered his accident with
the dog, she felt as if that partial blindness must have already been there in
him. For someone so intuitive and empathetic, he was, for instance, unknowing
of the true nature of his wife, believing that if there were errors in the
marriage the cause was in him. And he was a dreamer in terms of his compassion,
unaware of how the world was knit together unequally, so that the radius of his
generosity was short. He had never veered much into the real world.

She knew little of the
great world herself, less perhaps than he did. There was for her no life
outside her home. Every evening she sat in her kitchen,
then
slept in the bed behind the curtain. She could not write to Roman in prison
about what she felt for him, about her hunger for him, because he was unable to
read. She wished she had taught him, the way she had been taught, so he could
escape his solitude, but he had always returned from work exhausted. When
darkness came, she washed herself at the barrel of rainwater by the barn,
then
walked with the lamp towards the house. She’d pick up a
book, but as soon as she sat down with it she fell asleep in her chair. She
never got used to reading in indoor light, although every evening she attempted
this. It was already a pleasure to rest in a soft chair and
hold
a book in her hands. Sometime later, after the lamp burned down, she opened her
eyes. Perhaps the smoke from the burned-out wick woke her. She stood up,
gathering her senses into almost clarity, and went through the darkness to her
bed.

Because of his partial
vision Lucien Segura did not
fi
ght in the war. He volunteered instead to be part of a commission
that studied disease and trauma along the battle zones near the Belgian border.
He arrived at the front with treatises and reports he’d translated from German
texts of new rehabilitation techniques, but he was ignored by the young
overworked doctors. Around him was the chaos of troops being destroyed by
mortar and starvation and, above all, fear. They needed something else, not
someone to study them. While he continued to
fi
le reports, he began working in the
hospital tents. Within a month he had become another person, one of the
anonymous wave of soldiers and attendants, his face gaunt, the goatee spread
into a rough beard, while the impatience and anger in the missives he continued
sending to Paris meant that they were seldom read, just buried in
fi
les.

He caught the diphtheria
in his second year. At
fi
rst he had a mild fever, then dif
fi
culty swallowing. Two days later Lucien
could barely talk, unable to make even the sound of a murmur, his palate
paralyzed. The tissues of his neck were swelling and he was
fi
ghting for every breath. In the medical
tent he could see others bleeding from their mouths and noses and guessed this
was also a portrait of him. Lucien had been a passive and fateful man; now
everything in him fought to overcome the exhausting pain, so that he could
think clearly. He knew the disease
’
s
fi
rst twelve days were the most unforgiving
and dangerous. He knew too that there were other diseases prevalent in the camp
and insisted on sleeping in the open, crawling outside to avoid the circling
air of the wards. There was no solitude there, among those on the path to
death, and he needed privacy to hold on to what strength he had. He swallowed
only liquids that were certain to have been boiled, and refused offers of
unknown water.

The military reported his
likely fate in a letter to his wife and she arrived, barely recognizing him
among others in the sanatorium at Épernay. She
discovered,
when he was able to speak, that she could not understand his thought processes,
or his bitterness like a poison towards the political world. He demanded she
leave him alone with his ‘companions,’ though in reality he was fully solitary,
studying only himself to be aware of the shifts in his illness, in the desire
to survive.

After twelve days, he and
the others who were still alive were made to live alone in tents, made to wash
themselves and prepare their own meals. They were still toxic. They still
carried the ‘plague in the throat,’ the white membrane that might suffocate them.
The Spanish called it
garrotilla—
1613 was ‘the year of the
garrotilla.
’
He felt he knew more about diphtheria than anyone else there, and he was vain
and proud of this knowledge even as he was prostrate on the mud
fl
oor of his tent. Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s
had discovered the microbes through a microscope, ‘shooting through spittle
like a pike through water.’
A brother poet.
American
colonists saw the disease as ‘the fruit of strange sins,’ an act of God that
would ravage and thus cleanse the new world. All responses to diphtheria were
medieval until Napoleon’s army was being devastated by it, and he was forced to
offer 12,000 francs for the best study for prevention of the disease. The essay
that eventually resulted, by Bretonneau, which located the false membrane in
the throat, would remain a classic of clinical medicine. Then Agostino Bassi,
who studied diseases in silkworms, theorized the doctrine of parasitic
microbes. But along the Belgian border, in 1917, and in the sanatoriums, there
was still no cure, little more than prayer.

Lucien Segura was still
alive. There were days of delirium, then stillness, when he would lie on his
narrow cot exhausted, just looking at the back of his hand. Or at the cover of
a romance, one of several appallingly written books regularly left by soldiers
outside his tent, until one afternoon someone left him Balzac’s
Les Chouans,
a story of ‘love and adventure.’ In his feverish daze, Lucien could swallow
a volume a day.

The solitude at Épernay
gradually released him from the everyday world. He witnessed only what he saw
through the open
fl
aps of his tent. Once he overheard a strange rustling that confused
him as to what was occurring outside until an of
fi
cer was revealed attempting to fold up a
large topographical chart. Sound, and thereby imagined plots of sound
unwitnessed by the eye, became important.... He was lying on a daybed at
Marseillan listening to the gradual approach of crows, and then their bickering
in the poplars. He remembered the familiar hoofbeats of Marie-Neige’s cart
horse, the rustle of the outdoor shower as it sprayed onto the earth, muted now
and then by a body that stepped into it. He could make out the sound of
scalpels in the medical tent being placed back onto rubber sheeting. There
was
a dying man’s cough three tents over, and in it the
hidden fear that Lucien could recognize. He had these maps of sound, and they
taught him to locate distances, to distinguish a footstep on mud as opposed to
dust, or whether a voice was moving towards him or away.

He continued writing his
reports, hunched over in the tent. And with what remaining energy he had,
Lucien wandered back into his youth, his half-formed adulthood, reconsidering
incidents that might have altered him as this person here, now, under such dark
skies. It was as if he had been handed a mirror for the
fi
rst time and could see what he held only
faintly in his memory. Those nightly seductions of Madame de R
ê
nal in
Le Rouge et le Noir,
had they taught him something? Or
deceived him?
His dance with a light-boned writer.
The Dog.
The past was gate-less. An overlooked life came
rushing into his duncoloured canvas tent, till then so full of the certainty of
death. It was November now, and at night many were dying in the constant rains.
He had saved a partially used
fl
ashlight but would not waste it on the darkness except in an
emergency. He knew that, like him, it was a mortal thing.